SQ3

Zalina Nazarova
Eng 1320/1301. 158
Trang Phan
Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers
The author of these article Nancy Sommers talks about the difference of revision by student writer and experienced adult wrier. The writing process revision is understood as a separate stage at the end of the process. After several studies she concluded that the revision process was redefined as a sequence of changes in a composition. Most of the students that she studied didn’t use the terms revision or rewriting and they didn’t seem comfortable using word revision. It wasn’t a word they use it was a word their teachers used. Instead the students understand the revision process as a rewording activity which means they concentrate on particular words apart from their role in the text. The students consider and believe that most problems in their essays can be solved by rewording. Also what students do is they list repetition as one of the elements they most worry about. What they do is they eliminate the repetition either by substituting or deleting words or phrases. Although they are using different words they are merely restating the same idea with different words. Such blindness Nancy Sommers called inability t o see revision as a process. The experienced writers describe their primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument. They imagine a reader whose existence and whose expectations influence their revision process. Student writers constantly struggle to write their essays with a predefined meaning where are experienced writers do the opposite: they create meaning in the engagement with their writing in revision. Also the experienced writers see their revision as a recursive process which means a process with significant recurring activities with different levels of attention and different agenda for each cycle. Writing discovery is a repeated process of beginning over again which students failed to have. Students need to seek the dissonance of discovery as the experienced writers do. So these are the differences that Nancy Sommers discovered for past three years of studying revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writer.
“If the students feel inspired, if the writing comes easily and if they don’t get stuck on individual words or phrases, than they say that they cannot see any reason to revise” Explain it
It is not easy to get inspiration or to have it all the time. Inspiration comes and goes away and when it comes we feel like everything is going great and what we write is perfect and we don’t need to revise when we are inspired. That might work for some students but not for me. Even when I’m inspired and everything is great and I love the way my essay looks like I always go back and revise my paper. It’s very important to do so because even when you are inspired you make some mistakes and you should always revise after you done with writing.